Yesterday there was a discussion about possible new features coming in P6 from the interview with the guy from CL. One of the things mentioned was IBL, or Image-Based Lighting. This is already possible to some degree in P5, so I decided to make a short test animation using some techniques to simulate global illumination and HDRI in P5. Here's the result of this short test animation:

Diane Quicktime Version (223kb)
Diane Windows Media Version (229 kb)

This is a sample screencap of the animation for those of you with VERY slow dialup (the actual videos are reduced in size from this):

Some credits due:

Stewer's great HDRI python script with HDRShop and the lightgen plugin; Face_Off's real skin shader script (to which I adjusted some nodes for this test, etc.); V3 low resolution figure, and Sassy Hair 2.

Rendertime in P5 Firefly was about 7 or 8 hours I believe for 120 frames (ack!) with 40 lights and an environment-mapped sphere. Some postwork and color correction done in Combustion 3. Just a very simple animation meant primarily to test rendertimes in simulating HDRI in Poser. I think the result came out OK.

---

Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.